MachineGhost wrote:As a reminder, for a "silver bullet" cause of heart disease, anyone would be rationalizing from "inconclusive evidence" that it "allows" them to eat massive amounts of highly saturated fat foods carte blanch.
I think you're looking at it backwards. For thousands of years, people ate massive amounts of highly saturated fat foods! Much higher levels of saturated fat than we do now. When I mentioned this earlier, you replied with a very common misconception...
MachineGhost wrote:The average age of death was also 30-40.
No. That's false. That was average life expectancy
at birth —
adult life expectancy was much higher.
When you exclude childhood deaths, and deaths due to infectious disease and war, it becomes very clear that people often lived well into their 60s, 70s and 80s, before 1900. And they ate massive amounts of saturated fats. We know that from the historical record. Any survey of well-known pre-1900 historical figures shows a more realistic picture of average
adult life expectancy.
Hippocrates lived to 90
Plato live to 80
Leonardo da Vinci lived to 67
Michelangelo lived to 60
Galileo lived to 77
Queen Elizabeth I lived to 69
Bernini lived to 81
Rembrandt lived to 63
El Greco lived to 73
George Washington lived to 67 (probably died from acute bacterial epiglottitis complicated by his medical treatments)
Thomas Jefferson lived to 83 (died of uremia, severe diarrhea, and pneumonia)
Aaron Burr lived to 80 (had a stroke at 78)
William Penn lived to 73
Thomas Paine lived to 72
Noah Webster lived to 84
Paul Revere lived to 83
Benjamin Franklin lived to 84 (died of an abscess in his lungs)
John Adams lived to 90
Abigail Adams lived to 83 (died of typhoid fever)
John Quincy Adams lived to 80 (died of massive cerebral hemorrhage)
Samuel Adams lived to 81 (died of complications from an essential tremor)
James Madison lived to 85
James Monroe lived to 73
Andrew Jackson lived to 78
Martin Van Buren lived to 79
William Henry Harrison lived to 68 (died of pneumonia and pleurisy)
Zachary Taylor lived to 65 (died of an unknown digestive ailment)
William Blake lived to 69
Millard Fillmore lived to 74 (died of affects of a stroke)
James Buchanan lived to 77 (died from respiratory failure)
Franklin Pierce lived to 64
Andrew Johnson lived to 66 (died from a stroke)
Ulysses S. Grant lived to 63 (died of throat cancer)
Immanuel Kant lived to 79
Paul Cézanne lived to 67
Winslow Homer lived to 74
Claude Monet lived to 86
Edgar Degas lived to 83
The list goes on... One does not have to look hard to find famous historical figures that lived past 60. Many well-known historical figures lived long lives.
What do all of these famous historical figures have in common? They all lived during a time when people ate much more saturated fats than we do now. They cooked with lard. They lived during a time when people ate lots of eggs and butter and cream and whole milk and fatty meats. The people listed above were not laborers. They generally lived sedentary lives.
Heart disease and obesity was extremely rare before 1900. In fact, the first known heart attack didn't appear in the historical record until after modern refined vegetable oils came into existence.
So, to sit around and now tell us that "PubMed" and modern research has shown evidence that saturated fats cause heart disease is total crap when you consider that humans lived very long lives for thousands of years — on a diet of mostly saturated fats — with very little heart disease.
Chronic heart disease is a modern epidemic. Saturated fats have been around forever.
), but rather simply include it in my diet without fear or guilt.